Mapping Central Asia

Indian Perceptions and Strategies

Sébastien Peyrouse, Marlène Laruelle

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317100959
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Relazioni internazionali

With renewed American involvement in Afghanistan, Pakistan's growing fragility, and China's rise in power in the post-Soviet space, Central Asia-South Asia relations have become central to understanding the future of the Eurasian continent. Mapping Central Asia identifies the trends, attitudes, and ideas that are key to structuring the Central Asia-South Asia axis in the coming decade. Structured in three parts, the book skillfully guides us through the importance of the historical links between the Indian sub-continent and Central Asia, the regional and global context in which the developing of closer relations between India and Central Asia has presented itself since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the precise domains of Indo-Central Asian cooperation, and studies three conflict zones that frame Indo-Central Asian relations: the Kashmir question; the situation in Afghanistan; and fear of destabilization in Xinjiang. The international line-up of established scholars convincingly demonstrate the fundamental necessity to define the Indian approach on these issues and provide cutting-edge insights on the tools needed to understand the solutions for the decade to come.

PART I
The Past as a Link? Reassessing Indo-Central Asian History

Chapter 1
Foreign Policy and Myth-making: Great Game, Heartland, and Silk Roads

Marlène Laruelle

In spite of the increasing number of discourses that proclaimed the end of ideologies, with reference to the elimination of the opposition between “capitalist” and “socialist” worlds, and to the supposed victory of the market economy and the principle of democracy,1 the post-Cold War world could be defined as that of a return to ideologies. The lack of great directive principles by which to understand and articulate contemporary developments has indeed invited the formulation of new precepts, and this has occurred essentially around cultural arguments: both Christian and Muslim religious fundamentalism; a notion of civilizational specificity that aims to counter so-called Western democratic principles, adjudged not to be applicable outside of Europe and the United States; ecological ideologies, eschatological fears, conspiracy theories, etc. Geopolitics has made a return, in particular after the success of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations,2 and now provides a key framework for explaining the post-Cold War world. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the many wars in the former Yugoslavia, the two wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan are often analyzed in terms of an opposition between cultures or civilizations: between Jews and Muslims, between Catholics and Orthodox, between “terror” and the “war against terror,” between fundamentalism and democracy, etc.

Within this framework, the Central Asian region, defined either in a restricted way as the five post-Soviet states, or as “Greater Central Asia,” whereby it also includes Afghanistan, is the object of many geopolitical narratives. This situation can be explained by the feeling that this region, lost to our view during the Soviet period, has suddenly been rediscovered, becoming visible on the international scene with the fall of the Soviet Union and the independences of 1991. Present-day analyses of Central Asia are carried out through two major prisms: on the one hand, reminiscences of the Cold War, stamped by conspiracy theories about the obscure fight between the great powers; and, on the other, a vague form of geopolitical knowledge about the notion of Heartland. The particularity of these two prisms is that they are elaborated among political leaders, academic experts, and public opinion in both Central Asia and the West. The regime changes in Kyrgyzstan are, for example, often interpreted as actions which either Moscow or Washington has organized, without indicating the autonomy of local actors. And the feeling that the region is bound to play a crucial role in the world balance is also shared by most local decision-makers and great powers.

Geopolitics as a Way to Articulate post-Cold War Developments

These ideological frames enable all actors, according to their own specific political and economic objectives, to find a common language by which to formulate international challenges. These actors must also legitimate their foreign policy decisions to their public, regardless of whether that means democratic regimes faced with electoral volatility or authoritarian states which must, no less than others, employ cultural symbols and legitimating arguments in the name of some messianism. In his book Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambitions, Jan Snyder shows that mythmaking offers a shortcut for the legitimizing of domestic policy by providing a latent pool of malleable national symbols by which to validate the foreign policy agenda of states.3 The case of Central Asia turns out to be doubly pertinent for this analysis. First, because the Central Asian states play the mythmaking card in order to gain popular backing from their own societies, whose nation-building phase is in full swing. Second, because the region inspires mythmaking among the great powers and regional powers. While the Central Asian case is not unique in itself, its particularity stems from the high degree of ideological construction it provides, a phenomenon that can be explained in large part by the sudden rediscovery of the region and by its paradoxical character, that it is both peripheral and central.4

In less than two decades, the geopolitical readings of Central Asia have multiplied. It is variously cast as the “south” of the former Russian Empire, the eastern pole of Washington’s “Greater Middle East,” the new “Far West” of China, the “Greater Central Asia” linked to South Asia, the “Caspian Basin” qua historical place of conflict between Russia and Iran, and as a “Central Eurasia” where Slavic, Turkic, Persian, and Chinese cultures meet. These familiar interpretations invite neighboring and more distant states to project their power onto the region. Accordingly, for example, both the United States and the European Union have emphasized their view that the region is at the “crossroads of the world,” and thereby adopted geopolitical interpretations that are inspired by the great classics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The rhetorical character of the debates over Central Asia as a milieu des empires is inflated by the use of three terms in particular: the Great Game, the Heartland, and the Silk Roads.5

The notion of “Great Game” provides a way of reviving the Orientalist fashions of the 19th century, and Romanticism’s attraction to a mystical and mysterious “East” by endowing them with a smack of colonial adventure. The term refers to the conflicts of interest that arose between the Tsarist Empire and Victorian Great Britain in Central Asia6 and speaks as much to the public as it does to political and economic decision-makers, since it is eminently modern. Classical armed conflict is not at issue, but rather an indirect conflict based on cultural and commercial sway, which uses scientific knowledge as a weapon, as well as methods of disinformation and discrete struggles for influence, all elements which reflect astoundingly well the strategies of the 21st century post-Cold War world.7 However, this so-called revival of the “Great Game” must be nuanced, or even dismissed. First of all, the Central Asian states are not mere pawns, subject to competition between powers. They are independent actors that have a narrow margin to maneuver against big powers, but are more or less independent in their foreign policy decisions. Each of them has a very specific identity and a divergent view of its geopolitical environment. Second, there is no longer any binary opposition between two major powers in Central Asia as there once was between St. Petersburg and London: on the contrary, there are a great many actors and, therefore, many potential games of alliance and competition. Third, Central Asia cannot be conceived merely as a region of conflict between great powers, because it is also a space of complements and negotiation.8 The situation is thus far removed from what is historically meant by the “Great Game.”

The revival of geopolitical theory has profoundly shaped the new frameworks that are applied to the post-Soviet states of Central Asia and to Afghanistan. Sir Halford Mackinder’s claim that whoever controls the Heartland—the pivotal point between continental and maritime powers—controls the world has become a commonplace of discourses that vaunt Central Asia’s importance and the necessity that all the great powers to be present and recognized there. These discourses were reactivated by Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard.9 However, an important difference separates the two projects: Mackinder conceived the vast Russian territories as a central piece of the Heartland, whereas Brzezinski focused essentially on Central Asia and the addition of Afghanistan. Moreover, as Anita Sengupta rightly explains, while Mackinder conceived geopolitics as an objective science, based on geography and unconcerned with ideology, all his successors have adopted a view that is much more clearly politically engaged: their geopolitics is often more political than it is geo.10 Lastly, the Silk Roads theme makes this mythmaking complete: having spent several centuries at the peripheries of the great empires, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Asia’s rise to power has seemed to have revived East–West economic logics, forming an historical parallel with the ancient era stretching from the 2nd century bc to the 16th century, a period during which Central Asia was one of the main conduits for exchanges between China and the Mediterranean Sea.11

It should be noted that these three myths have not developed in a uniform way among all the international actors that are present in Central Asia. The Muslim countries, for example, have tended instead to play the card of a return by the Central Asian states into the Muslim fold (with Turkey adding a pan-Turkist dimension), but the success of this approach has been rather mitigated. Upon political independence, all the five post-Soviet states did in fact claim to have “rediscovered” their Islamic identity and express a desire to open up to the Islamic powers, but half-way into the 1990s their fear of Islamism contributed to halting these nascent partnerships, which had also proven economically disappointing. Since the second half of the 2000s, the United Arab Emirates, as well as Malaysia, have gained in visibility, although without becoming centerpieces of the Central Asian game. Turkey and Iran, which were both very present in the years immediately following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, are still well established in the region, but they have nevertheless lost in importance. The reference to Islam as a mythmaking tool of foreign policy has thus turned out, as least for the moment, to be less powerful than predicted.

The former colonial power in Central Asia, Russia, shares with both the United States and Europe the sentiment of returning to the “Great Game.” It upholds an interpretation of the region that is distinctly marked by Cold War precepts. And it perceives NATO’s projects for eastward expansion as proof that Washington is implementing a strategy of containment against it in the post-Soviet space.12 The idea of Central Asia as a Heartland also remains very present in Russia, especially as it is based on Russia’s own geopolitical apprehensions, linked to Eurasianist theories, about itself as the major geopolitical linchpin of so-called Eurasian space and the natural balancer between Asia and Europe.13 However, Moscow has not promoted the notion of the Silk Roads, which is not part of its intellectual toolkit on Central Asia, since the underlying geo-economic rationales of these Roads is to exclude Moscow from new geopolitical configurations.14

The Asian countries, mainly China, India, Japan, and South Korea, share all three of the grids for interpreting Central Asia also used by the United States and Europe: all claim to want to transform the Great Game into logics of cooperation between the great powers, and think that their power must be projected onto this Heartland in order to confirm their role in the global equilibria of the 21st century. However, their emphasis is placed on the notion of the Silk Roads, to which each lends a specific national flavor. Japan, for example, emphasizes the role that Central Asia played in the spread of Buddhism from India toward East Asia and presents itself as the country best qualified to show the Central Asian states the way to economic modernization without losing cultural identity,15 while South Korea has openly claimed to see the region—to which it adds Mongolia—as the possible cradle of the ethnic and linguistic origins of Koreans. China, for its part, has set up a large ideological production machine designed for the international community as well as for its own citizens. For China, the notion of the modern Silk Roads is a means by which to present itself not only as a historical partner of Central Asia, a fact that has been forgotten in recent centuries, but also to pass over the question of Islam in Xinjiang by highlighting the pre-Islamic periods of the Han and Tang Dynasties. As James Millward relevantly puts it, “what in the West are celebrated as Silk Road exchanges and interconnectivity are, in China, portrayed rather as evidence that the world is beating a path to China’s (once again) open door. Rather than as a transnational bridge between civilizations, the Silk Road here is nationalized as China’s doorstep.”16

Legitimizing Current Situations through Historical Analogies

The Indian perception of the Silk Road myth is similar to the Chinese one. The Indian policy on Central Asia, which Emilian Kavalski has deciphered in his India and Central Asia: The Mythmaking and International Relations of a Rising Power, confirms the importance of mythological traits in the implementation of foreign policy narratives.17 This phenomenon is especially significant inasmuch as India, like China, thinks of itself not only as a state but also as a civilization, one whose glorious past is the sign of its future greatness. The features of its civilization are therefore often advanced as legitimate arguments to explain contemporary situations. In addition, New Delhi, which has not yet succeeded in imposing itself as a major partner of the Central Asian states, has engaged in a sort of discursive inflation as a solution to its lack of action and influence in the region. As India and Central Asia share no common border, no territorial disputes can tarnish their relations, and history is thus free to be re-evaluated. These reference...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figure
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I THE PAST AS A LINK? REASSESSING INDO-CENTRAL ASIAN HISTORY
• PART II CONTEXTUALIZING INDO-CENTRAL ASIAN RELATIONS: HOPES, DISILLUSIONS, AND PRAGMATISM
• PART III THE IN-BETWEEN POINTS OF TENSION: PAKISTAN, AFGHANISTAN, KASHMIR, AND XINJIANG
• Conclusion
• Index